Jesse and Ramon are a happy, loving couple but after years trying to get
pregnant they turn to adoption, relieved to think that once they
navigate the bureaucratic path to parenthood they will finally be able
to bring a child into their family. But nothing prepared them for the
labyrinthine process—for the many training sessions and approvals, for
the ocean of advice, for the birthmothers who would contact them but not
choose them, for the women who would call claiming that they had chosen
Jesse and Ramon but weren’t really pregnant. All the while, husband and
wife grapple with notions of race, class, culture, and changing family
dynamics as they navigate the difficult, absurd, and often
heart-breaking terrain of domestic open adoption.

From Amazon:Unexpectedly widowed Gwen-Laura Consadine is still mourning her husband
Edwin when her older sister Margot invites her to join forces as
roommates in Margot’s luxurious Village apartment. For Margot, divorced
amid scandal (hint: her husband was a fertility doctor), and then made
Ponzi-poor, it’s a chance to shake Gwen out of her grief and help make
ends meet. To further this effort, she enlists a third boarder, the
handsome, gay, cupcake-baking Anthony.

As the three swap
money-making schemes and timid Gwen ventures back out into the dating
world, the arrival of Margot’s paroled ex in the efficiency apartment
downstairs creates not just complications but the chance for all sorts
of unexpected forgiveness.

Kate's in the middle of the biggest meeting of her career when she
gets the telephone call from Grace Hall, her daughter’s exclusive
private school in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Amelia has been suspended,
effective immediately, and Kate must come get her daughter—now. But
Kate’s stress over leaving work quickly turns to panic when she arrives
at the school and finds it surrounded by police officers, fire trucks,
and an ambulance. By then it’s already too late for Amelia. And for
Kate.

An academic overachiever despondent over getting caught cheating has jumped to her death.
At least that’s the story Grace Hall tells Kate. And clouded as she is
by her guilt and grief, it is the one she forces herself to believe.
Until she gets an anonymous text: She didn’t jump. Reconstructing Amelia
is about secret first loves, old friendships, and an all-girls club
steeped in tradition. But, most of all, it’s the story of how far a
mother will go to vindicate the memory of a daughter whose life she
couldn’t save.

Waking up knee-deep in the San Francisco Bay with no understanding of
how she got there, 39-year-old Lucie Walker discovers she has
no memories of her past or her loving fiancé, Grady. After being
diagnosed with a rare form of amnesia, Lucie returns to her previous
life with Grady in Seattle only to find evidence of the “old” Lucie—an
insecure and shallow personality she no longer recognizes, or wants to.
Like a detective, the new Lucie attempts to find the path from past to
present, only to remember shocking pieces of a dark childhood that tempt
her to run away from everything all over again. To complicate matters
more, she finds herself falling in love with her fiancé and his big
close-knit clan of a family just as he seems to be falling out of love
with her. But as Lucie begins to open up to the world around her, she realizes that she can build a future as the
woman she wants to be, rather than the one her past dictated.

When
it comes to movie reviews, critic Violet Epps is a powerhouse voice.
But that's only because she's learned to channel her literary hero,
Dorothy Parker, the most celebrated and scathing wit of the 20th
century. If only Violet could summon that kind of courage in her personal life.

Determined to defeat her social anxiety, Violet visits the Algonquin
Hotel to pull strength from the hallowed dining room, where Dorothy
Parker and so many other famous writers of the 1920s traded barbs. But
she gets more than she bargained for when Dorothy Parker's feisty spirit
re-materializes from an ancient guestbook and hitches a ride onto her
life.

From Amazon:Haunted by the freak accident that killed their father when they were
children, Jim and Bob Burgess escaped from their Maine hometown of
Shirley Falls for New York City as soon as they possibly could. Jim, a
sleek, successful corporate lawyer, has belittled his bighearted brother
their whole lives, and Bob, a Legal Aid attorney who idolizes Jim, has
always taken it in stride. But their long-standing dynamic is upended
when their sister, Susan—the Burgess sibling who stayed behind—urgently
calls them home. Her lonely teenage son, Zach, has gotten himself into a
world of trouble, and Susan desperately needs their help. And so the
Burgess brothers return to the landscape of their childhood, where the
long-buried tensions that have shaped and shadowed their relationship
begin to surface in unexpected ways that will change them forever.

The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for
the arts become inseparable. Decades later, the bond remains powerful,
but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer
follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as
their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge.

The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age 15 is not always
enough to propel someone through life at age 30; not everyone can
sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence.

Wide in scope, ambitious, and populated by complex characters who come together and apart in a changing New York City, The Interestings
explores the meaning of talent; the nature of envy; the roles of class,
art, money, and power; and how all of it can shift and tilt
precipitously over the course of a friendship and a life.

Beloved author Haywood Smith's Out of Warranty is a witty social satire that's right on topic for anyone who's ever had to deal with health insurance claims. Out of Warranty sends
up the health insurance industry, the medical profession, and falling
apart ten years before Medicare. To quote widowed Cassie Jones: "If you
have anything weird wrong with you in this country, you'd better be
Canadian."

When medical costs eat up all of Cassie's money, she
decides she must remarry for health insurance, but her fix-ups and
e-dates are unsuccessful, despite the grudging help of fellow patient
Jack, a reclusive, one-legged curmudgeon on the same appointment
schedule at her specialist's. When dating doesn't work out, Cassie
comes up with a pragmatic but unconventional solution. As always with
Haywood Smith's books, there are plenty of laughs and lots of heart.

From Amazon:It has been more than 60 years
since Elaine Greenstein’s twin sister, Barbara, ran away, cutting off
contact with her family forever. Elaine has made peace with that loss.
But while sifting through old papers as she prepares to move to Rancho
Mañana—or the “Ranch of No Tomorrow” as she refers to the retirement
community—she is stunned to find a possible hint to Barbara’s
whereabouts all these years later. And it pushes her to confront the
fierce love and bitter rivalry of their youth during the 1920s and ’30s,
in the Jewish neighborhood of Boyle Heights, Los Angeles.

In the stunning tradition of Lisa See, Maeve Binchy, and Alice Hoffman, The Tin Horse is
a rich multi-generational story about the intense, often fraught bond
sisters share and the dreams and sorrows that lay at the heart of the
immigrant experience.

After suffering a stroke, patriarch William Adair wakes up in his
hospital bed and realizes that his family has changed: they are less
extraordinary than he had remembered. For more than 30 years, his
faith in life was grounded on two indisputable principles: his three
daughters’ exceptional beauty and talents and the historical resonance
of a carriage house built by his grandfather. Now, both have begun to
collapse.

The carriage house, held captive by a neighbor
since a zoning error classified it as her property, has decayed beyond
recognition and risks being condemned. William’s daughters—all tennis
champions in their youth—are in decline. Having lost their father’s
pride, the three sisters struggle to define themselves.

William’s ailing
wife is suffering from dementia. As she forgets her daughters, they
forget themselves.

To help him recover, William’s
daughters take on the battle for the carriage house that once stood as a
symbol of their place in the world. Overcoming misunderstandings,
betrayals, and wrong turns deep in the past, each of the Adairs
ultimately finds a new place of forgiveness and love.

It’s 1989, the Berlin Wall is about to come down, and Kate has just
graduated from Yale. She is anxious to make her mark, yet has no idea
how to pursue life as a fledgling painter. So when she receives a
surprising job offer to work as the assistant to Lydia Schell, a famous
American photographer in Paris, she immediately accepts. It’s a chance
not only to be at the center of it all, but also to return to the city
for the first time since she was a lonely nine-year-old girl sent to
live with cousins while her father was dying of cancer. Lessons in French is at
once a love letter to Paris and the story of a young woman defining
herself, and finding her moral compass, in the tall shadow of a
powerful boss.

As an infant, Alice Thornton was discovered in Kettleborough, New
Hampshire, in a boathouse by the lake; adopted by a young, childless
couple; raised with no knowledge of the women who came before her. Alice
grows up aching for an acceptance she can't quite imagine, trying to
find it first with an older man, then with one who can't love her back,
and finally in the love she feels for one she has never met. And all
the while, she feels a mysterious pull to the lake. As Alice edges ever closer to her past, Lake People beautifully evokes
the interweaving of family history and individual fate, and the
intangible connections we feel to the places where we were born.

Perfect. Pretty. Political. For nearly 40 years, The Hellinger
sisters of Hastings-on-Hudson--namely, Imperia (Perri), Olympia (Pia),
and Augusta (Gus)--have played the roles set down by their loving but
domineering mother Carol. Perri, a mother of three, rules her
four-bedroom palace in Westchester with a velvet fist, managing to fold
even fitted sheets into immaculate rectangles. Pia, a gorgeous and
fashionable Chelsea art gallery worker, still turns heads after
becoming a single mother via sperm donation. And Gus, a fiercely
independent lawyer and activist, doesn't let her break-up from her
girlfriend stop her from attending New Year's Day protests on her way
to family brunch.

But the Hellinger women aren't pulling off
their roles the way they once did. Each woman is unable to believe that anyone, especially
her sisters, could understand what it's like to be her. But when a
freak accident lands their mother to the hospital, a chain of events is
set in motion that will send each Hellinger sister rocketing out of her
comfort zone, leaving her to wonder: was this the role she was truly
born to play?

Twenty years after ruling the halls of her
suburban Chicago high school, Lissy Ryder doesn't understand why her
glory days ended. Back then she was worshiped...beloved...feared.
Present day, not so much. She's been pink-slipped from her high-paying
job, dumped by her husband, and kicked out of her condo. Now, at 37, she's struggling to start a business out of her parents'
garage and sleeping under the hair-band posters in her old bedroom. Lissy finally realizes karma is the only bitch bigger than she was. Her
present is miserable because of her past. But it's not like she can go
back in time and change who she was...or can she?

A place out of time, Ashaunt Point—a
tiny finger of land jutting into Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts—has
provided sanctuary and anchored life for generations of the Porter
family, who summer along its remote, rocky shore. But in 1942, the U.S.
Army arrives on the Point, bringing havoc and change. That summer, the
two older Porter girls—teenagers Helen and Dossie—run wild. The
children’s Scottish nurse, Bea, falls in love. And youngest daughter
Janie is entangled in an incident that cuts the season short and haunts
the family for years to come.

As the decades pass, Helen and then her son Charlie return to the
Point, seeking refuge from the chaos of rapidly changing times. But
Ashaunt is not entirely removed from events unfolding beyond its
borders. Neither Charlie nor his mother can escape the long shadow of
history—Vietnam, the bitterly disputed real estate development of the
Point, economic misfortune, illness, and tragedy.

Based on his widely read columns for The New Yorker, Ian Frazier’s uproarious first novel, The Cursing Mommy’s Book of Days,
centers on a profoundly memorable character, sprung from an
impressively fertile imagination. Structured as a daybook of sorts, the
book follows the Cursing Mommy—beleaguered wife of Larry and mother of
two boys, twelve and eight—as she tries (more or less) valiantly to
offer tips on how to do various tasks around the home, only to end up
on the ground, cursing, surrounded by broken glass. Her voice is
somewhere between Phyllis Diller’s and Sylvia Plath’s: a hilariously
desperate housewife with a taste for swearing and large glasses of red
wine, who speaks to the frustrations of everyday life.

On the day John F. Kennedy is inaugurated, Claire, a young wife and
mother obsessed with the glamour of Jackie, struggles over the decision
of whether to stay in a loveless but secure marriage or to follow the
man she loves and whose baby she may be carrying. Decades earlier, in
1919, Vivien Lowe, an obituary writer, is searching for her lover who
disappeared in the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. By telling
the stories of the dead, Vivien not only helps others cope with their
grief but also begins to understand the devastation of her own terrible
loss. The surprising connection between these two women will change
Claire’s life in unexpected and extraordinary ways.

From Amazon:Five years ago, Tia fell into obsessive love. The only
problem—Nathan was married and the father of two boys. When she became
pregnant, he disappeared, and she gave up her baby for adoption. Now,
she’s trying to connect with her lost daughter and former lover.

Five years ago, Caroline,
a dedicated pathologist, reluctantly adopted a baby to please her
husband. She prayed her misgivings would disappear; instead, she’s
questioning whether she’s cut out for the role of wife and mother.

Five years ago, Juliette
considered her life ideal: she had a loving family, believed in her
marriage, and her business thrived. Then she discovered Nathan’s
affair. He’d promised he’d never stray again and she trusted him. But
Juliette never knew about the baby.

Now, when
photographs of the child arrive, Juliette’s devastated. How could
Nathan deny his daughter? And if he’s kept this a secret from her, what
else is he hiding? Desperate for the truth, Juliette goes in search of
the little girl. Her quest leads to Caroline and Tia and before long,
the women are on a collision course with consequences that none of them
could have predicted.

Coming of age in the patrician neighborhood of Pasadena, California
during the 1960s, Rebecca Madden and her beautiful, reckless friend
Alex dream of lives beyond their mothers' narrow expectations. Their
struggle to define themselves against the backdrop of an American
cultural revolution unites them early on, until one sweltering evening
the summer before their last year of college, when a single act of
betrayal changes everything. Decades later, Rebecca’s haunting
meditation on the past reveals the truth about that night, the years
that followed, and the friendship that shaped her.

The Good House tells the story of Hildy Good, who lives
in a small town on Boston’s North Shore. Hildy is a successful
real-estate broker, good neighbor, mother, and grandmother. She’s also
a raging alcoholic. Hildy’s family held an intervention for her about a
year before this story takes place and now
she feels lonely and unjustly persecuted. She has also fooled herself
into thinking that moderation is the key to her drinking problem.

As
if battling her demons wasn’t enough to keep her busy, Hildy soon finds
herself embroiled in the underbelly of her New England town, a craggy
little place that harbors secrets. There’s a scandal, some mysticism,
babies, old houses, drinking, and desire—and a love story between two
craggy 60-somethings that's as real and sexy as you get. An
exceptional novel that is at turns hilarious and sobering, The Good House asks the question: What will it take to keep Hildy Good from drinking? For good.

National bestselling author Erica Bauermeister returns to the enchanting world of The School of Essential Ingredients in this luminous sequel.

Lillian and her restaurant have a way of drawing people together.
There’s Al, the accountant who finds meaning in numbers and ritual;
Chloe, a budding chef who hasn’t learned to trust after heartbreak;
Finnegan, quiet and steady as a tree, who can disappear into the
background despite his massive height; Louise, Al’s wife, whose anger
simmers just below the boiling point; and Isabelle, whose memories are
slowly slipping from her grasp. And there’s Lillian herself, whose life
has taken a turn she didn’t expect. . . .

Their lives collide
and mix with those around them, sometimes joining in effortless
connections, at other times sifting together and separating again,
creating a family that is chosen, not given. A beautifully imagined
novel about the ties that bind—and links that break—The Lost Art of Mixing is a captivating meditation on the power of love, food, and companionship.

The Hardings are teetering on the brink. Elson—once one of Houston’s
most promising architects, who never quite lived up to expectations—is
recently divorced from his wife of 30 years, Cadence. Their grown
son, Richard, is still living at home: driving his mother’s minivan,
working at a local coffee shop, resisting the career as a writer that
beckons him. But when Chloe Harding gets kicked out of her East Coast
college, for reasons she can’t explain to either her parents or her
older brother, the Hardings’ lives start to unravel. Chloe returns to
Houston, but the dangers set in motion back at school prove
inescapable.

Cambridge student Serena Frome’s beauty and intelligence make her the
ideal recruit for MI5. The year is 1972. The Cold War is far from
over. England’s legendary intelligence agency is determined to
manipulate the cultural conversation by funding writers whose politics
align with those of the government. The operation is code named “Sweet
Tooth.”

Serena, a compulsive reader of novels, is the perfect
candidate to infiltrate the literary circle of a promising young writer
named Tom Haley. At first, she loves his stories. Then she begins to
love the man. How long can she conceal her undercover life? To answer
that question, Serena must abandon the first rule of espionage: trust
no one.

The Leading Indicators
By Gregg Easterbrook
Publication Date: November 13

From Amazon:

Margo and Tom Helot have the perfect life. They inhabit a fully
redecorated home situated in the peaceful, leafy suburb of a major
American city. Their family is rounded out by two delightful children
well on their way to achieving perfect Ivy League applications.
Everything has turned out more or less as they'd hoped and expected it
would. Until, that is, it all comes crashing down around them
when Tom's boss reveals that their company is bankrupt. Forced into
the job market just as the Dow plummets and unemployment starts to
spike, Tom finds himself buffeted by the winds of misfortune,
bouncing from one failing company to the next and towing his family
into a maelstrom of debt and financial insecurity. With nowhere else
to turn, he and Margo must make the ultimate choice to save their
family's future.

When Claire Nagy marries Forster Baumsarg, the only son of
prominent California citrus ranchers, she knows she’s consenting to a
life of hard work, long days, and worry-fraught nights. But her love
for Forster is so strong, she turns away from her literary education
and embraces the life of the ranch, succumbing to its intoxicating
rhythms and bounty until her love of the land becomes a part of her.
Not even the tragic, senseless death of her son Joshua at kidnappers’
hands, her alienation from her two daughters, or the dissolution of her
once-devoted marriage can pull her from the ranch she’s devoted her
life to preserving.

But
despite having survived the most terrible of tragedies, Claire is about
to face her greatest struggle: an illness that threatens not only to
rip her from her land but take her very life. And she's chosen a
caregiver, the inscrutable, Caribbean-born Minna, who may just be the
darkest force of all.